Re: [PATCH v6 1/5] ci: replace IPsec-mb package install

[David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 4:26 PM Power, Ciara <ciara.power@intel.com> wrote:
> > From: David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>
> > On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 2:50 PM Brian Dooley <brian.dooley@intel.com>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > From: Ciara Power <ciara.power@intel.com>
> > >
> > > The IPsec-mb version that is available through current package
> > > managers is 1.2.
> > > This release moves the minimum required IPsec-mb version for IPsec-mb
> > > based SW PMDs to 1.4.
> > > To compile these PMDs, a manual step is added to install IPsec-mb v1.4
> > > using dpkg.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Ciara Power <ciara.power@intel.com>
> > > ---
> > >  .github/workflows/build.yml | 25 ++++++++++++++++++++++---
> > >  1 file changed, 22 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
> > >
> > > diff --git a/.github/workflows/build.yml b/.github/workflows/build.yml
> > > index 776fbf6f30..ed44b1f730 100644
> > > --- a/.github/workflows/build.yml
> > > +++ b/.github/workflows/build.yml
> > > @@ -106,9 +106,15 @@ jobs:
> > >        run: sudo apt update || true
> > >      - name: Install packages
> > >        run: sudo apt install -y ccache libarchive-dev libbsd-dev libbpf-dev
> > > -        libfdt-dev libibverbs-dev libipsec-mb-dev libisal-dev libjansson-dev
> > > +        libfdt-dev libibverbs-dev libisal-dev libjansson-dev
> > >          libnuma-dev libpcap-dev libssl-dev ninja-build pkg-config python3-pip
> > >          python3-pyelftools python3-setuptools python3-wheel
> > > zlib1g-dev
> > > +    - name: Install ipsec-mb library
> > > +      run: |
> > > +        wget "https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libipsec-
> > mb-dev_1.4-3_amd64.deb"
> > > +        wget "https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libipsec-
> > mb1_1.4-3_amd64.deb"
> > > +        sudo dpkg -i libipsec-mb1_1.4-3_amd64.deb
> > > +        sudo dpkg -i libipsec-mb-dev_1.4-3_amd64.deb
> >
> > I am not enthousiastic at advertising a kind of out of tree approach.
> > That's a bit like if NVIDIA asked us to stop testing distribution rdma-core
> > packages and instead rely on MOFED.
> >
> > Why are we removing support for versions that are packaged by the main
> > distributions?
>
> With Ubuntu 22.04, ipsec-mb v1.2 is the version available through the package manager.
> We were aiming to make v1.4 the minimum version for ipsec-mb PMDs from this release onwards,
> removing the many ifdef codepaths in the PMDs for older versions. (patch included in this patchset)
>
> Some of the other CI environments were updated to install v1.4 already to support this change,
> but we found the github CI robot was limited for ipsec-mb versions when using the package manager.
> It had some failures comparing ABI with v1.2 installed (SW PMDs compiled in reference build, but not compiled after patch).

Such a change means that users of the Ubuntu/Fedora dpdk package lose
access to those drivers hypothetically.
"Hypothetically", because in reality, Ubuntu and others distributions
won't update to non LTS versions.

On the other hand, if a user was building DPDK (and not the one
provided by the distribution), now the user has to stop using the
ipsec mb provided by the distribution: building/packaging/maintaining
the ipsec mb library is now forced on the user plate.

I am unclear if this qualifies as a ABI breakage, but I am not
confortable with this change.


-- 
David Marchand